Midnight train to Moscow: Kim Jong Un cosies up with Russia

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Ora Ogumbiyi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

If you ever wanted to steal a car, there are plenty of tips on social media. You'll find that two South Korean brands are the ones to aim for because it's easy. So easy, in fact, that some American cities are suing the carmakers for not making it harder.

And if I mention drive thru food, you're probably not thinking of piping hot, freshly made French brick. Our correspondent looked into the success of a new kind of baguette shop popping up outside of urban centres that you can drive to or through. But first, This morning, North Korean state media reported that its leader, Kim Jong Un, had departed the capital Pyongyang. His destination, Russia. According to South Korean officials, Mr. Kim crossed the border between the two countries on his armored train in the early hours. The Americans say he's there to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and seal an arms deal. But what might that entail, barring a.

Quick trip over the border to South Korea and to speak to Donald Trump. The last time Kim Jong Un left. North Korea was in 2019 to meet Vladimir Putin and Vladivostok.

Andrew Knox is our Korea's correspondent At that time.

The two agreed to improve relations between their countries, but not that much came of it. It was in fact only when Russia invaded Ukraine that they started getting cozier. North Korea started sending missives of support to Russia and to Mr. Putin in particular. Now it seems as if that support might turn into something a bit more material.

So what do we know so far about why Mr. Kim is going?

Really, we know very little about this meeting. I mean, it's only very recently that the Kremlin and Pyongyang confirmed that it was actually happening. But for about a week now, the Americans have been saying that they're trying to strike this arms deal. And this is a continuation of a long standing claim from the Americans that North Korea has been selling weapons to the Russians to aid their war effort. And if that's indeed true, North Korea stands to gain quite a lot from selling munitions to the Russians. Among the things they might ask for are food to help with their endemic shortages, energy or just good old fashioned hard cash. Russia might also invite in North Korean laborers, as they have been doing for decades, but is now firmly against UN sanctions. At the outside, Russia might also offer some sort of military help to North Korea. Now that could be in the form of more advanced weapons than the North Koreans have, or in technology transfer, helping them to be able to create these weapons themselves. That's a possibility, but experts I spoke to suggested that it's not necessarily that likely. I mean, ultimately in the medium to long term, helping the North Koreans build up their high tech weaponry is actually detrimental to Russia's interests. They're essentially creating competitors in terms of international arms sale at very little benefit to them.

Okay, so then what is in Russia's interests? What's in it for them?

So this again is a little bit unclear. There's a certain amount of propaganda value to this meeting. I mean, having Mr. Putin posed with Mr. Kim, who sort of represents anti Americanism at its most flagrant and vociferous, has a certain appeal to domestically, but it's kind of marginal. The value of North Korea in weapons is also a little bit unclear. Experts sort of argue about how much difference this would actually make. North Korea is thought to have quite large stockpiles of both artillery shells and rockets, but reportedly they prefer to sell older stock, some of which is said to be in pretty poor condition. Another possibility is that the Russians might be keen to buy some of the ballistic missiles that North Korea has been so frequently testing over the last two years. And ultimately there are a lot of systems that they might potentially be interested in, since most North Korean munitions are based on old Soviet platforms.

So Russia could get some weapons from North Korea in exchange for some technical military knowledge. Is there anything the international community can do about this?

Well, Jake Sullivan, America's National Security Advisor, certainly wants Russia and North Korea to believe that there is. He in fact went out of his way to warn North Korea to rethink these cells providing weapons to Russia for use on the battlefield to attack grain silos and the heating infrastructure of major cities as we head into winter to try to conquer territory that belongs to another sovereign nation. This is not going to reflect well on North Korea, and they will pay a price for this in the international community. Mr. Sullivan has suggested, as indeed have other US officials, that targeted sanctions might follow. But the UN and individual countries have imposed sanctions on North Korea for years in an attempt to compel them to behave differently. And so far it's not been particularly successful. They continue to develop weapons at a pretty astounding rate. And nothing that the US or its allies have tried, be that enticement or threat, has really changed North Korea's trajectory.

And Andrew, beyond the deal itself, is there any kind of message Mr. Putin or Mr. Kim are trying to send out here?

One thing to note immediately is that there's no real reason why Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim have to meet face to face. Russia sent its defense minister to North Korea back in July. They could have wrapped up a deal then, or of course, any of this stuff could have been done remotely. So one has to look at what is being signaled by the fact that Mr. Kim is actually taking this 20 plus hour journey. And I think one of the important signals to recognize is from Russia and it's to South Korea. And the signal here is that they shouldn't accede to NATO and U.S. requests to supply lethal aid to Ukraine or perhaps even step up the non lethal aid they've already been giving, because the Russians equally can decide to give aid to their enemy, North Korea. It also signals to the Americans that Russia still has the ability to cause trouble for them in East Asia.

And do we know what kind of international impact this is having? I mean, what has the American or South Korean reaction been like?

As of yet, South Korean officials have been reasonably quiet about this. They still believe that Russia has a lot of power over what North Korea might do and they're afraid of upsetting them. And for the moment. With neither the Russians nor the North Koreans having yet acknowledged that this is in fact an arms deal that they're doing, they have no real reason to come out in public against it. In fact, it might be a long time before we know that it is an arms deal. Any such deal would be a massive violation of UN Sanctions, and it's not obvious why either North Korea or Russia would want to advertise that fact. We might not know that this has happened until we see North Korean munitions actually used in the course of war. The Americans, on the other hand, have been very keen to signal that neither side should strike such a deal and that the world be aware that this might be going on. Part of what America might be doing by drawing attention to this is trying to convince South Korea that they have more skin in the game when it comes to Ukraine than they often acknowledge. But there may be another message here as well. Even before the meeting was formally announced, Kamala Harris, America's vice president, described Russia's courting of North Korea as an act of desperation. America seems very keen to create a sense that Russia's running out of cards to play.

Andrew, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks very much for having me.

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If you go on TikTok and search for Kia boys, you see a lot of videos of essentially car theft.

Daniel Knowles is our Midwest correspondent.

What I was looking at as a tutorial practically it shows a gloved hand from behind holding a steering wheel and it pulls the plastic off the steering wheel housing. Then it comes up with a screwdriver and it jams that into the sort of ignition switch where the key would go and it wrenches that aside and it shows this little nub underneath that. Then a USB cable was attached Onto it twisted and the car starts up. That video when I found it online, it's since been taken off. TikTok had 415,000 likes and was the first one that came up when you searched for Kia Boys. So the Kia Boys are the self described name for adolescents who have worked out how to steal cars and joyride them and are posting on social media, primarily TikTok, about their experiences doing this. Last year, over a million cars were stolen across America according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. And that was the highest figure since 2008. And among the most stolen cars were several models made by Kia and Hyundai to Korean manufacturers. And now there are seven different American cities who are suing the manufacturers.

Well, we'll come to the lawsuits in a moment, but how did the number get that big?

Car theft of all types of vehicles has been going up, but the number of Kias and Hyundai stolen has soared. It's become a very large proportion of total thefts. And the reason why seems fairly simple. If you go back to a few years ago, a lot of cheaper Kia and Hyundai model of cars were sold without immobilisers and immobilizers. This tech that we've had in cars since the 1980s, that basically kind of puts a breaker in the circuit that starts the car and means that you can't start a car without a key fob, something other than just the key and the socket. In 2015, to give some context, 96% of cars sold by car manufacturers who aren't Kia and Hyundai came with immobilizers in the United states, but only 26% of those made by Hyundai and Kia had immobilisers. Cars without immobilizers are very easy to steal. And if you look at one of the cities that's filed a lawsuit against these manufacturers, which is Chicago, where I live, here's Hyundai's made up 40% of vehicle thefts last year, and so far this year, more than half. And they are not that share of the vehicles on the road. They're something like 5% of the vehicles on the road. So they're being stolen much out of proportion to how many of them are. And what the city alleges is that by not including immobilizers, they made the vehicles really easy to steal and sell, sort of were negligent effectively.

And you mentioned that several cities are bringing this, this kind of lawsuit.

Yeah, there's seven in total include Baltimore, New York City, Columbus, Ohio and a few more. And they essentially all say that selling cars that were so easy to steal, has kind of wasted police time, enabled other crimes and caused a public nuisance in effect.

Do you get the feeling that that is a sound legal basis for a suit?

So I talked to a legal scholar at the University of Chicago, a guy called Todd Henderson, and he said that cities, kind of, on the face of it, have a case. He basically argues that it's about whether the product is defective. And he argues that a simple, cheap technology that's available, that if you don't fit it, then you're essentially negligent the product is defective. Kia and Hyundai, they say their vehicles were compliant with the law. American law doesn't require immobilisers to be fitted in cars, unlike a lot of other countries. And both firms have also offered software updates which ought to make it a lot harder to seal the cars than it was before. The new vehicles that they're selling also all have immobilizers fitted. So it's really older vehicles that were sold a few years ago that this applies to.

And what about the notion in these lawsuits that a failure to fit immobilizers enabled other crime?

I also talked to an academic who's a British criminologist, actually, but whose study of the effect of car immobilizers is his entire life. He's a guy called Graham Farrell at the University of Leeds. And he argues that cigar theft is this really important crime, because first thing is that you often need it car to do a lot of other crimes, and particularly an untraceable car. So if you want to do drive by shooting, having a stolen car makes it a lot easier. One of the other things, though, that Farrell argues is that stealing cars is a sort of gateway drug of a crime. It's often one of the first serious crimes that a teenager might commit and feel the joy and effects of joyriding. If you start by stealing cars, you tend to go on to have a more extensive criminal career later in life, is what his research shows. That's one of the reasons to be really worried about this. Car theft has plummeted since the early 1990s and is still, even with recent increases, a lot lower. And in the last few years, there's been this big spike in murder rates in the US which now seems to be dropping again. A lot of violent crime that increased in 2020, 2021 seems to be falling again. But if you have all of these teenagers getting into car theft, where you begin to worry, what will they be doing in three or four years time? The big risk is Basically that the Kia boys are just getting started.

Daniel, thanks very much for your time, Jason.

It's always a pleasure.

Now, this isn't the first time we've pointed this out, but French people really take their bread seriously. In France, the boulangerie is traditionally a feature of every village square or every high street. And they aren't just places to buy bread. They're social environments where neighbors meet and gossip. But now the traditional neighborhood one is struggling and a new iteration is flourishing far from walkable high streets.

If you drive around France at the moment, it's really quite striking that there is what seems to be a boom in baguette shops.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

It's very unexpected, partly because there's been a rise in the cost of raw materials and energy prices and baguette prices have gone up. But there they are, these drive through or drive in bakeries offering French customers baguettes and croissants and pain au chocolat to car borne customers.

So when you say boom, how boomy are we talking?

Well, Last year in 2022, more new boulangeries opened their doors in France than closed, according to a research group called Alteress. And across the country, There were over 2,500 new bakeries last year. If you look at the Paris region, it's interesting because the fastest growth in boulangeries has been the outer suburbs. That's the low density areas where people rely on a car and not the built up center of Paris. And there are chains of these bakeries you can now see in outer city areas like Maribacher, which is a chain of lingeries on roundabouts or other places that's easy to get to by car. And that chain now has 700 outlets across France and 70 of them opened last year alone. And it now ranks as one of the top 10 fast food chains in France.

And I imagine its and others outlets are not quite like the sort of quaint high street baguette shop that I'm thinking of.

Well, they're not. And they're often off the motorway near drive in McDonald's or Burger King. So you don't have the same charm as you do on the high street. But in order to be called a boulangerie in France, you have to have your baguettes made from the dough that's prepared and kneaded and baked on the premises. So although they have industrial scale kitchens that you can often see through a glass wall, you do need to use the traditional methods and that's a condition in France for the label boulangerie.

And so now they've broken into the market. Do you think the drive thru version is here to stay or is this just a fad?

Well, I think it's probably going to stay because it corresponds with changes in people's living habits. If you look at the car ownership In France, over 4/5 of French households own at least one vehicle. A lot of them have two. And although people in the city tend to think that everyone lives in apartments in France, it's just not true. Most people rely on their cars to get to work or to take their kids to school. And I think what the drive in or the drive to Boulangerie also represents is a very stubborn fact about French life, and that's that the French remain as attached to their daily or even their twice daily baguette as they do to the use of the car. And I don't think that's about to change.

Sophie, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason. Always good to chat.

Thank you.

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